While it would be good for us now (and for eternity) to turn to God for help, and God can use temptation or suffering for our greater good, that doesn’t mean that God regularly makes us suffer so that we will turn to Him. Rather, God can take a terrible situation and create good out of it. So if we are suffering and choose to turn to Him for solace and guidance and Grace, He has offered us something good among the suffering that we couldn’t have created on our own.
We Catholics are told to read the Bible as a whole and not pick out a phrase or a concept divorced from the entirety of Sacred Scripture. We must also understand evil in relationship to all of the Church’s teachings, Scripture, and Tradition. As parents, we use daily events and reactions to those events as a way to teach our children how to do God’s will. In a mysterious way, God uses all of our experiences and reactions to them to lead us closer to Him, to do His work here, and so that we may be with Him for eternity in Heaven when we leave this world. The Catechism puts it this way, “There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil.” [CCC309]
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Helpful articles/video on the topic of natural evil:
The Problem of Natural Evil by Stephen Beale
St. Thomas Aquinas on the cause of evil
Bishop Barron’s video on God, Tsunamis, and the Problem of Evil: